Analysts claim that North Korea’s new missiles are fake

Analysts who have studied photos of a half-dozen ominous new North Korean missiles showcased recently at a lavish military parade say they were fakes, and not very convincing ones. The weapons displayed April 15 appear to be a mishmash of liquid-fuel and solid-fuel components that could never fly together. Undulating casings on the missiles suggest the metal is too thin to withstand flight. Each missile was slightly different from the others, even though all were supposedly the same make. They don’t even fit the launchers they were carried on. AP

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How close is Iran to making a nuclear strike on Israel?

I often quote Debka reports because they have unique content based on intelligence sources not available elsewhere, since they have contacts within Israeli and American intelligence. However, in the past few years, they’ve predicted various military actions coming soon that never occurred. So you, Dear Reader, will have to be the judge of how much credibility to assign to this story.

According to Debka’s subscriber-only newsletter (forwarded to me by a subscriber), Israeli intelligence believes that the window for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is closing very rapidly, and a decision must be made right away. Thus, if a decision is made to attack, then the attack will occur within the next few weeks. (The implication, not explicitly stated by Debka, is that if there’s no attack within the next few weeks, then there’ll never be an attack.) Israel has reached this conclusion based on intelligence that Iran has enough nuclear material already to construct a bomb, or at least a “dirty bomb,” and that it would take only about six weeks to do so.

According to the Debka report, Iran would have several options for attacking Israel, once they had a nuclear weapon. Some of these options are extremely dramatic:

This scenario draws on the assumption that Iran may not yet have built a nuclear bomb capable of delivery by a ballistic missile, but has developed two cruder nuclear devices: One can be delivered by an airplane or a ship and the other is a radioactive or dirty bomb, which is cheaper and easier to make and can be used by Iran’s proxy terrorists. …

The preparations Israel has put in train rest on the presumption that Tehran, in line with its avowed objective of destroying the Zionist state, is plotting to attack Israel with a crude nuclear device, regardless of whether or not the Netanyahu government decides to go to war on Iranian military nuclear facilities. To the world, Tehran would designate a prior attack “preemptive” and a subsequent offensive “retaliatory.” …

According to intelligence input – not just hypotheses – Iran’s leaders have set their minds on a flash war, to be kept short by their nuclear resources. Neither missiles nor ground combat play a part in the Iranian scenario.

2. A lone civilian plane or ship carrying a large nuclear device would take off from Lebanon with Athens or Cyprus registered as its destination. Suicide air crews and frogmen, who have already completed specialist training courses, would detonate the device within 50-60 kilometers off the Israeli Mediterranean coast. …

For the same exercise by sea, suicide frogmen would be dropped from small boats sailing out of Lebanon or Cyprus. They would drop their deadly nuclear cargo 50-60 kilometers off the Israeli shore and so menace its major urban centers, Tel Aviv, Netanyahu and Haifa.

This tactic would save Iran having to launch ballistic missiles or long-range bombers which might be intercepted by US or Israeli missile shields and challenged by Israeli Air Force warplanes.

3. Iran’s strategists give high odds for their nuclear explosion at sea triggering a tsunami towering 50-60 meters high for inundating Israel’s coastal plain, where the bulk of its population is concentrated. If it were detonated off Rosh Hanikra, they calculate the deadly waves would be hurled into Haifa Bay and flood Haifa and Acre (350,000 inhabitants) up to 42 kilometers (26 miles) inland, before crashing onto the Carmel Mountain range (500 meters high) and being washed back to sea.

This backwash would sweep up every object in its path and complete the destruction. The best-case scenario for the strategists in Tehran would be for a nuclear-triggered tsunami to deluge the most densely inhabited part of Israel and its financial and commercial heartland, the Tel Aviv conurbation. It might then roll on east and engulf a population of 2.9 million together with Israel’s missile and nuclear centers, before smacking into the Jerusalem Hills (average height of 670 meters) at the town of Bet Shemesh and sweeping back.

Well, that’s really dramatic — dropping a nuclear weapon into the Mediterranean Sea to generate a tsunami to wipe out Israel. Debka

Chances of a preemptive nuclear strike by Iran on Israel

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike by Iran, even if Iran had the capacity to do so, is unlikely, for several reasons.

First, as I’ve been writing for many years, Iran is basically a schizophrenic nation. Its top leadership, starting with the supreme leader, are survivors of the 1979 Great Islamic Revolution, an extremely bloody civil war. Like generational crisis war survivors in any country, these leaders imposed austere rules and institutions designed to prevent another bloody civil war, and this has led them to adopt a harsh anti-Western attitude. But the generations born after the crisis war have no such motivation, and Iran’s younger generations are, in fact, generally pro-Western and have no particular desire to see Israel pushed into the sea. As months go by, people in these younger generations are displacing the war survivors, moving Iran’s policies closer to the West. This change is occurring throughout society, even within the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC). Thus, there would be enormous opposition within Iran’s institutions to a preemptive strike, even if they had a nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, as I’ve described before, Iran takes pride in not having invaded other countries, even though other countries have invaded Iran. If you look back at Iran’s major wars of the last century — the Constitutional Revolution of the 1900s decade, the Great Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, Iran never attacked anyone else. This is now part of Iran’s DNA, and even the top leadership would be repulsed by the idea of a preemptive attack on Israel.

Finally, I would remind long-time readers what I’ve been saying for years: That I expect Iran to be our ally, along with India, Russia and the West, in the Clash of Civilizations world war, opposing China, Pakistan and the Sunni Muslim countries.

What is far more likely is a preemptive attack by Israel on Iran. Israel is in a generational crisis era, and close to a state of full scale panic. In that case, Iran would feel free to respond in any way it could.

Azerbaijan clarifies its relationship with Israel

As we’ve reported several times in the last few months, Israel’s trade relationships with Azerbaijan have been growing rapidly, and there have been unconfirmed reports that Azerbaijan will allow Israel to use its airbases on its border with Iran in an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. However, the Azeris have firmly denied these reports. In particular, President Ilham Aliyev stressed clearly that Azerbaijan will never participate in the military plans of other states against its neighbors. In fact, there are obvious reasons why it would be suicidal for Azerbaijan to grant Israel access to its territory for an attack on Iran:

If Israel were to attack Iranian nuclear facilities from Azerbaijani territory, Baku would face the brunt of an Iranian retaliatory strike. Azerbaijan’s military capacity would not be enough to protect the country’s critical infrastructure.

Second, around 20 million ethnic Azeris live in Iran, but their collective allegiance lies more strongly with their host country; they are not in fact waiting to be “liberated” by Azerbaijan. Thus, Iranian ethnic Azeris would perceive any apparent actions by Baku that enabled Western or Israeli bombing of Iran as a betrayal by their ethnic kin across the border.

Last, but not least Azerbaijan is trying to maintain diplomatic neutrality and not get into any activities that could be considered hostile to Iran.